Hi everyone, and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation podcast.

This is podcast number 21, and my name is Mandy.

I hope you listened to last week's show because it gives the base for today's continuation

of American English rhythm patterns and the rhythm rule.

The rhythm rule says that when English is spoken, the speaker alternates between stressed

and unstressed syllables in regular intervals, with the stresses generally falling within

content words. Remember, content words are the words that give us the contents of what we are

saying. They are usually the words that give us a picture in our head. In general, content words

are stressed more than function words.

Function words are grammatical words like articles, pronouns, and conjunctions.

There's a table of content words and function words with last week's transcripts.

Last week we listened to the different ways we could stress the content words of the sentence

I bought a blue car and keep the stressed syllables on a regular beat.

Here's a repeat of the three options of ways to stress that sentence.

If you're reading the transcripts along with this show, you'll see that the stressed words have been bolded.

I bought a blue car on Tuesday. I bought a blue car on Tuesday. I bought a blue car on Tuesday. I bought a blue car on Tuesday.

Today we are going to expand on that a little and then listen to a clip

from a movie. I'm going to change the color of the car that I bought from blue to purple. The only

difference between the sets of sentences is obviously the color. First my car was blue, and now it's purple.

Purple is a two-syllable word, while blue is a single-syllable word. I have the same options

of which words to stress in the sentence I bought a purple car. I will probably stress my verb, bought, and then I can stress the word purple, or car, or purple and car. Listen to the sentences. I bought a purple car. I bought a purple car. I bought a purple car. I bought a purple car.

I bought a purple car.

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